Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Apple Falls Near the Nuclear Tree

Internet companies often cloak themselves in an image of environmental awareness. But some companies that essentially live on the Internet are moving facilities to North Carolina, Virginia, northeastern Illinois and other regions whose main sources of energy are coal and nuclear power, the report said. The report singles out Apple as one of the leaders of the charge to coal-fired energy.

At the time, this just seemed silly. Companies needing a lot of electricity moved to states that had a lot of electricity or could easily generate it. If it came from nuclear energy, even if some people griped about it, so be it—believe it or not, if you need a lot of clean electricity, you couldn’t do better.

Apple is being criticized for trying to justify its placement of a data center in Ireland, by keeping it as far away from nuclear facilities as it can. According to one document, Apple chose to construct the data center at Athenry, County Galway as the best possible location, despite an apparent requirement for it to be at least 320 kilometers (198.8 miles) away from the nearest nuclear facility, though complaints suggest this to be not only a made-up detail to justify the location, but that the chosen plot is also within the supposed range of one nuclear site.

Ireland doesn’t have any nuclear facilities, but England does and therein lies the problem—because the proposed site is near enough to Sellafield and the shuttered Wylfa (in Wales). But frankly, who cares? There is way too much irony and even hypocrisy here to waste time on small details (why 198 miles, for example? Perhaps Apple calculated that was the number needed to makes its point – and goofed.)

For example, the Apple data center is going to need a lot of electricity—just like those in Virginia and North Carolina—and pitching your tent away from nuclear energy doesn’t improve the energy profile.

Opposition to the project claim Apple's center could cause a considerable strain on the national grid, consuming up to eight percent of the total available power. It is feared that this high usage could prompt energy producers to raise electricity bills of all users in Ireland, in order to cope with the increase in demand.

Hmmm! What might help the data center put less strain on the national grid? (Generally speaking, though, increasing output does not signal higher prices.) As it happens, Ireland has access to more electricity.

A nuclear reactor is unlikely ever to dominate the landscape of Carnsore, Co Wexford. In Co Leitrim not a single rock has been fracked – and none might ever be. Yet nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing are already in Ireland.

Why?

Ireland imports electricity derived from nuclear power from the UK through the East West Interconnector, an underground and submarine power cable that runs between north Wales and Rush, Co Dublin, connecting Ireland and Britain’s electricity grids. In time we will tap into cheap nuclear power from France and elsewhere through new interconnectors.

Irony? Perhaps. Hypocrisy? Well, that’s a little tougher. Apple says it wants to avoid nuclear plants to avoid being in the path of an accident. As a risk-benefit exercise, that’s nonsensical. We cannot really know Apple’s motives, but we can know this: nuclear is and remains beneficial, most notably to large data centers such as Apple’s—lots of electricity at low cost.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

For more than 100 years, the shape and location of human settlements has been defined in large part by energy and water. Cities grew up near natural resources like hydropower, and near water for agricultural, industrial and household use.

Hard to say with precision, but Third Way, the non-partisan think tank, asked the design team at the Washington, D.C. office of Gensler & Associates, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in sustainable projects like a complex that houses the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The talented designers saw a blooming desert and a cozy arctic village, an old urban mill re-purposed as an energy producer, a data center that integrates solar panels on its sprawling flat roofs, a naval base and a humming transit hub.

There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
It's all around us. You can't feel it. Smell it. Or taste it.
But it's there all the same. And if you look close enough, you can see all the amazing and wondrous things it does.
It not only powers our cities and towns.
And all the high-tech things we love.
It gives us the power to invent.
To explore.
To discover.
To create advanced technologies.
This invisible force creates jobs out of thin air.
It adds billions to our economy.
It's on even when we're not.
And stays on no matter what Mother Nature throws at it.
This invisible force takes us to the outer reaches of outer space.
And to the very depths of our oceans.
It brings us together. And it makes us better.
And most importantly, it has the power to do all this in our lifetime while barely leaving a trace.
Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?

If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution. In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. E…